I've only been using Mandrake Linux to any great extent for the past couple of weeks or so, and just a little while ago, as I was perusing this board trying to find an answer to my sound problem in Mandrake 10.1 Community, but couldn't seem to find something that seemed to apply to me, as Mandrake was recognizing my motherboard's built-in sound components (for the record, I have an SiS 7018 motherboard).

For anyone who's getting that error message saying that the sound device won't start and that it'll use the null output device instead...well, that's the problem I was having, too, and I was trying a whole bunch of things, none of which solved the problem. I was also having the problem of clicking on the speaker icon in my task panel for KMix (with a red X on it, I might add), and it giving me a more or less blank window, and nothing working right as far as the sound was concerned.

I have no idea why I did this, but I stumbled across a solution, not really expecting to. For some weird reason (and I swear I don't remember why I did this), I decided to right-click the speaker icon and click "quit". I then went to the start button -> Multimedia -> Sound -> KMix -- and it started right up, WITHOUT THAT BLASTED RED "X" THERE! :-) I tested it with a few games, and sure enough, I now have sound again! This is one thing I'll definitely try if I should ever find myself in the same bind again.

Fred from the Ozarks